RjSteinert.com

I found an interesting post from Paul Lutus, the author of Apple Writer. I enjoyed reading about how he preferred living in the woods and his speculations on lost human interaction. In his last section he argued the following point:

"I believe the computer age favors the individual and that resistance to the individual work style is the last gasp of the dying industrial age."

I disagree with Lutus that working in teams is dying work style. Computers, especially since the popularization of the Internet, have enhanced our ability to communicate thus making collective efforts far more effective than ever before. While an individual's efforts can benefit through productivity by their very own way of doing something, the Internet allows us to collaborate on a mass scale.

We make sense of this massive collaboration by setting standards and guidelines. Take for example a team of 20, 5 of those people may find those guidelines unacceptable thus sacrificing productivity of the whole team. But in a group of millions, like we have on the Internet, you will find thousands of people who find those guidelines acceptable thus allowing thousands of individuals to work harmoniously together.

Perhaps this is why we find many successful Open Source projects for the same solution. In the Drupal community we have set standards and guidelines for contributing code and Drupal users (ex. Anyone who visits WhiteHouse.gov ;-) benefit from the code contributed by thousands of other Developers working on the same piece of software. Of course the Drupal way is not for everyone and those individuals may contribute to many of the other successful open source Content Management Systems that tackle the same problem that Drupal does.